Scott Alexander's theory is that having an open forum has become incredibly difficult, maybe tending towards impossible. All the incentives line up to make moderation steadily more costly or steadily more draconian over time, or both:
It's not clear how to preserve a forum for free expression while spammers or trolls seek to suck up all the available bandwidth for their messages. You can end up with a sort of spectrum allocation problem, where if everyone is allowed to crowd the same frequency then communication on it becomes impossible. But once you start moderating content, it's really hard to find a satisfying balance. And on the margins, some trolls are indistinguishable from some people with really unbelievable opinions.
I don't know what the answer is, it seems like a really complicated problem.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
It's not clear how to preserve a forum for free expression while spammers or trolls seek to suck up all the available bandwidth for their messages. You can end up with a sort of spectrum allocation problem, where if everyone is allowed to crowd the same frequency then communication on it becomes impossible. But once you start moderating content, it's really hard to find a satisfying balance. And on the margins, some trolls are indistinguishable from some people with really unbelievable opinions.
I don't know what the answer is, it seems like a really complicated problem.